A couple of places fingers are pointed at are increased fidelity requirements and complexity as hardware has improved, increased use of outsourcing (see Halo In

A couple of places fingers are pointed at are increased fidelity requirements and complexity as hardware has improved, increased use of outsourcing (see Halo Infinite and Star Citizen), churn and larger teams which makes effective collaboration harder, executive meddling in order to chase after trends (it needs a battle pass/battle royale/zombies) and it becoming increasingly realistic for devs being able to splinter off and make something with a smaller more effective team. For example on Infinite you had a scenario where people might not be around long enough to learn the in house tooling which was troublesome enough to cause some to want to drop what's been done and switch to Unity whiplashed around by directions set by different parts of the company and half the workers were 18 month contract workers.[1] If you compare the credits for the Mass Effect trilogy series for example there's a good amount of people who left by the end of ME3 and fewer are still there for a ME4. Mike Laidlaw, Steve Gilmore for example. Drew Karpyshyn is lead writer on only the first two ME games. Aaryn Flynn, James Ohlen and Casey Hudson both went off to make their own studios. [1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-08/how-microsoft-s-halo-infinite-went-from-disaster-to-triumph https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-08/how-micro...